With it being Christmas, the Guardian has again published “the world’s more difficult quiz”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,3604,1379479,00.html as given to the pupils of King William’s College. A first scan leaves me with a single-figure score, but I bet Kieran would do much better….

UPDATE: Mark D. Lew has posted “an annotated list of answers”:http://home.earthlink.net/~markdlew/quiz/ (179/180).

Since Christmas never changes (and a good thing too!) I’m reposting my Christmas Eve post from my blog last year. I did plan more work on it, but haven’t done any (story of my life). Merry Christmas to all who celebrate it, and a happy New Year to everyone (at least everyone who uses the Gregorian calendar).

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I’m just about to knock off for Christmas[1], but I have to get ready for a conference at Queensland Uni of Technology early in the New Year where Larry Lessig will be the main speaker. I’m giving a very short presentation, and struggling to improve my understanding of all this, in particular the relationship between the technology of the Internet and notions of social capital. I haven’t come up with anything earthshattering, but I have had some thoughts on which I’d welcome comments.

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John DiIulio of ‘Mayberry Machiavellis’ fame has a short article on ‘Attacking “Sinful Inequalities”‘ in the current issue of “Perspectives on Politics”:http://www.apsanet.org/perspectives/dectoc.cfm.

bq. Bible-believing Christians are supposed to heed the call to “be not afraid” of any worldly challenge. Whether you are a person of whatever faith or no faith, if you believe that inequality is a moral problem, and you are convinced that it is a real problem in America today, you should not be afraid to say so – and not be afraid to recommend whatever policies or programs you believe might make a real and lasting difference. In the post-1980 debate over inequality, at least as I have experienced it, it is liberals, not conservatives, who have normally lacked the courage of their true convictions, some for fear of being accused of favoring “big government” or having other thoughts out of season.

A while ago, I looked at the ticking bomb problem and concluded that, whatever the morality of using torture to extract life-saving information in emergencies, anyone who did this was morally obliged to turn themselves in and accept the resulting legal punishment. Reader Karl Heinz Ranitzsch has pointed me to a real-life case, reported by Mrs Tilton at Fistful of Euros. The case involved a threat of torture, rather than actual torture, and the deputy police commissioner involved was convicted and fined. Without detailed knowledge of the circumstances, I tend to agree with Mrs T that this was about the right outcome.

Spotted in Toronto, where I spent part of last weekend – while George Bush is Time Magazine’s “Person of the Year”:http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2004_12/005349.php, Time Canada’s “Newsmaker of the Year” is “Maher Arar”:http://www.timecanada.com/CNOY/story.adp?year=2004. It makes for an interesting juxtaposition.

Smoking gun or no smoking gun, the line going around in Ireland about David Blunkett’s resignation is; ‘Jesus, a Minister who didn’t sort out a visa application for someone he knew should have to resign.’

Plus, is anyone else irritated that the same Jacques Chirac who lazed by the pool while thousands of elderly Parisians baked to death last year ditched his Moroccan holiday for a photo opp with the released hostages Christian Chesnot and Georges Malbrunot?

My article The Unsustainability of U.S. Trade Deficits has just been published in The Economists’ Voice along with a piece on government deficits by Ronald McKinnon. Although relatively new and oriented to a general audience, EV looks like being a high-powered journal, having already published Stiglitz, Posner and Akerlof among others, so I’m pretty pleased to have made it into volume 1. Thanks to everyone here and on my blog who helped me to sharpen my arguments on this topic.

Update One point in my piece that I thought was at least modestly novel was my observation that the US government has been shortening the term of the Treasury securities (bonds, notes and bills) it issues. Now, via Brad DeLong, I see that Nouriel Roubini has just covered the same issue in a lot more detail, offering what he describes as “A Nightmare Hard Landing Scenario for the US $ and the US Bond Market..”. And you all thought I was bearish.

“China Mieville”:http://www.socialistreview.org.uk/article.php?articlenumber=9150, on whom there will be more in this blog in the New Year, tells us how the Socialists saved (will save) Christmas.

‘Angry Moderate’ made a comment on my post on plagiarism last week, which I’ve been meaning to respond to.

bq. Richard Ellickson’s marvellous book, Order Without Law, notes that the first and usually most effective sanction against violators of a community norm is, “truthful malicious gossip.” In my experience, this is quite common with regard to plagiarists – and the worst plagiarism is not copying off some web-site but stealing other scholars’ ideas and/or empirical material before they publish it – and quite appropriate and quite effective. The only problem is the equally large circulation of untruthful malicious gossip.

This seems to me to be the beginnings of an interesting take on the problem of plagiarism – like Robert Ellickson’s cattle ranchers in Shasta county, we could resolve the problem of plagiarism informally, if only we had an effective means of spreading truthful malicious (as opposed to untruthful malicious) gossip about who has plagiarized. The problem is, of course, that the informal personal networks of academia don’t seem up to the task – as the “Chronicle”:http://chronicle.com/free/v51/i17/17a00802.htm reported, even the department chairs of some offending academics don’t seem to know that they have plagiarized. Thus, part of the problem is poor communications among academics. Here, the new institutional economics suggests that centralized communications can play an important role. Work by game theorists suggests that a centralized communications structure in which one actor is an “honest broker” of information about who has behaved badly and who hasn’t, can support honest behaviour among a much larger group of participants than a decentralized structure which relies on one-to-one gossip alone. As Avner Greif, Paul Milgrom and Barry Weingast have pointed out, this was one of the key functions that guilds played in the late mediaeval period – they had centralized communications systems policing the behaviour of guild members to ensure that they all played by the rules. Any member of the guild who broke the rules (by trading with someone who the guild was boycotting) would find that he was boycotted himself by other guild members.[1]

Of course, in academia, the closest equivalent to guild structures – the various professional associations – don’t play this role. As the Chronicle documents, they seem loath to discipline their members – and even more loath to publicize their disciplinary actions when they take them. Clearly, they don’t have the powers to punish plagiarists themselves. But by identifying and publicizing incidents of plagiarism they could do a lot to solve the problem, leaving the actual enforcement to one-to-one interactions among academics themselves, so that identified plagiarists would find it difficult to get jobs and grants. The current situation in which it’s difficult to distinguish ‘real’ incidents of plagiarism from malicious gossip, is in many ways the worst of all possible worlds. Of course this wouldn’t be a complete solution – some of the kinds of plagiarism that ‘Angry Moderate’ identifies would be hard to police – but it would go a fair way towards remedying the problem.

fn1. Greif, Avner, Paul Milgrom, and Barry R. Weingast. “Coordination, Commitment and Enforcement: The Case of the Merchant Guild.” in Explaining Social Institutions. eds. Jack Knight, and Itai Sened. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995

I see from the BBC that the Charities Bill is really going to force private schools to prove that they are charities in order to claim charitable status. I had heard about this before, but never imagined it would get this far. The story says that:

bq. The Charities Bill says schools charging fees will have to demonstrate how their activities help the public. The Independent Schools Council (ISC) said its members saved the tax payer £2bn a year in education costs. Independent watchdog the Charity Commission will decide on the parameters of the term “public benefit”.

Good for New Labour….

With the disgraceful scenes in Birmingham[1], coming hot on the heels of the blow-up over incitement to religious hatred, it is wonderfuly ironic to ponder the following legal hypothetical.

Apostate Sikhs are very definitely a group defined by their religious views. As are apostate Muslims and heretics or blasphemers in general. The Home Office
FAQ doesn’t mention blasphemers specifically, but it does reassure the atheists and says that the proposed Bill “will also protect people targeted because of their lack of religious beliefs or because they do not share the religious beliefs of the perpetrator”.

It is hard for me to see how the people in Birmingham’s gurdwaras who stirred up these crowds could have done so without taking steps which would at least prima facie have given rise to a case that they had incited hatred against the play’s author. I doubt that specific acts of violence could be laid at their door, but this crowd did not assemble spontaneously, nor did its members become enraged entirely as a result of their independent theological scrutiny of the theatre listings.

Therefore, in rank defiance of almost every newspaper editorial this morning, I submit that the Bezhti affair is weak evidence in favour of the draft legislation, as it seems to me that some Sikh elders in Birmingham have behaved in a highly socially destructive and reprehensible way, that they have most likely not committed any offence under current UK law in doing so, but that their behaviour would have been illegal under the proposed legislation. This doesn’t make me a supporter of the Bill itself, but it’s worth thinking about.

Footnote:
[1]Actually, they’re not really that disgraceful. The theatre has a right to put on an offensive play, anyone who is offended with it has the right to stage a demonstration, and the rozzers have the right to protect the public if that demonstration turns rowdy, which they have declared themselves willing and able to do. The only real failure of the system here was that either theatregoers or theatre managements decided to go all namby about a “riot” in which nobody was hurt and only three arrests were made, all for public order offences. Gawd help us if the Premier League decides to adopt this standard of “safety”. However, the playwright has apparently now received death threats, which are genuinely disgraceful whether or not the people making them have the ability or intention to carry them out.

It’s Christmas here at Crooked Timber, though this does not mean we are “Republicans”:http://www.slate.com/id/2111014/#red. I can’t hope to match Maria’s “instant-classic Christmas post”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001013.html from last year — for one thing, it’s harder to stir up the ole Christmas cheer in the “Sonoran Desert”:http://www.branimirphoto.ca/gallery/arizona/sonoran_desert.html than the “Champs Elysees”:http://travel.guardian.co.uk/gallery/image/0,8564,-10304117908,00.html. But it’s not impossible. Last year we had a thread about the “Most Annoying Christmas Songs”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/000943.html, and my feeling is that being down on Christmas music is so over.[1] Here instead are four Christmas songs I like. Besides being songs for the season, they are all songs for two voices in conversation — or argument.

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Jeffrey Rosen has a piece in yesterday’s NYTimes Magazine about the practice of blogging intricate details about one’s dating and sex life on one’s blog. (I was going to say “one’s private life”, but how private is it once it’s been blogged and read by hundreds?) As usual with journalistic pieces such as this one, it is hard to tell how widespread the phenomenon is, but it is out there to some extent and may be worth some thought. I certainly know that people in my social circles – friends, family members, colleagues – do wonder what I will and will not blog about from our interactions and sometimes even preface comments by saying “this is not for blogging”. I always reassure these people that I never blog information about other people without permission and in general rarely mention any names or other identifying information (except to give credit, but I check in such cases as well). However, from reading the article one would think my practices are more the exception than the rule.

Since I do not blog anonymously there is more social control over what I decide to make public. After all, everything I say reflects on me in return. Outing information about others that many may find inappropriate will have negative repercussions on me. So even if I had no concerns, whatsoever, about the privacy of people around me – but I do – a solely self-interested approach would still dictate that I keep information about others’ lives private in order not to upset people and in turn lose credibility and trust in the future. However, such social control operates much less effectively among those who can hide behind the veil of a pseudonym.

As I prepare for my upcoming undergraduate class in which students will be required to maintain blogs, I have spent quite a bit of time thinking about how to comply with the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA). According to FERPA, I have to make sure that certain details about student enrollment in my classes are kept private. In the process, I have realized that this is a one-way street. There is nothing preventing my students from blogging whatever information they decide about me. Of course, social sanctions may still exist. Students may decide it is not worth upsetting their instructor through such practices. Nonetheless, there will be plenty of opportunities for blogging things after class is over. Moreover, they may have individual blogs not associated with the class that are written anonymously and can serve as an outlet for commentary about others.

Of course, we all have different selves depending on the social situations in which we find ourselves and there is no reason one should let down certain guards in front of a classroom or when with a group of colleagues. Perhaps the most disturbing part about the phenomenon described in the article is that people are blogging intricate details about their private lives, which in turn includes the private lives of others. Of course, as long as this is a known fact one can accept it and behave accordingly (or not accept it and stop spending time with the person assuming that’s an option). But it sounds like this practice often only becomes clear after the fact, which seems to put unfortunate added pressure on private interactions.